Fred Costello

Born 1904

Speared by Aborigines

My grandparents were gold miners in Bendigo.
Dad, John Costello, was a gaol warder. I was about
thirteen and a half when I ran away from home and
school, workin’ for cockies for food and a bed to
lay in. I first came to the Territory with horses in
1926 from Western Queensland. I worked on a
station as a ringer. As a prospector I got a couple of
leads around Halls Creek. I had 6 or 7 camels on
my camel string. When you went out prospecting
it might be 6 months, so you carried flour, tea
and sugar.

I used camels for knocking around, prospecting, a
bit of dogging. Scalps were 7 shillings and 6 pence
a scalp then. In 1928, about 5 miles away from
Anabella Spring, Tietkens Birthday Creek, the
Aborigines came up to my camp in the night and
stole all me tucker. They pinched the sugar, flour,
tobacco. I was asleep. I woke up and saw their tracks
around the tucker boxes. I got another blackfella and
followed their tracks up into the ranges, like a fool.
I went in this cave about the size of this room and
seen all me tucker thrown about. I got the blackfella
to pick it up and went out the front of the cave and
was standing with me back to the cave, holding a
revolver, looking about for them. The Aborigines
came over the top of the cave and that’s when they
speared me in the back, right on me backbone.
Between the shoulder blades it was. It wasn’t a
shovelnose; it was a mulga barb spear. Stuck in and
hurt like hell. I fired the revolver back over my head.
I staggered down the hill and somehow got on me
camel and rode about 2 miles back to camp. An old
fella, Tom Grady, by pure luck came along on the
same day, about 2 hours later. He was doggin’, same
as me. I reckon he saved me. I would have been
finished. I was paralysed in the upper body. I was
pretty helpless. When I got cold, I got stiff. It wasn’t
a bloody wound but it was in a bad place.
I remember the pain; it was in the sinew. He give
me a bit of a hot poultice. Old Tom stayed with me
and I camped there about a week. Just healed up
myself; too far away to go to the doctors. I’ve never
bothered showin’ it to a doctor. I’ve never recounted
that story before. I shot one bloke in the neck; didn’t
kill him, though, and they took him to the hills then.

I can’t recall any other whitefellas that had the
same experience as me [lived through a spearing]
‘cause the blackfella usually made a job of it.
Without my revolver I would have been absolutely
defenceless. That was their country and they were
like bloody kangaroos in their country. They’d tie
3 kangaroos and balance them on top of their heads,
then go down the side of a mountain. Those
mountain blacks in that granite mountain country
were that agile, they were like mountain wallabies.
The Pitjantjatjara were right through that country -
Peterman, Musgrave and Mann Ranges.

That Coniston clean-up, they shot over 300.
Officially it was only 30. They shot far more blacks
than blacks killed whites. The ratio would be 20 to
1 or more. I don’t think I would have been in it. I
don’t believe in shooting human beings like rabbits.
The irony of it all, the blackfellas that killed Fred
Brooks, they shot through to Mt Hardy about 100
miles from the Coniston and the police arrested
them 6 months later, took ‘em to Darwin, tried ‘em
and they got acquitted which makes the whole
clean-up a joke. Us old-timers didn’t refer to it as
a massacre; we called it a shoot-out or a clean-up.
The only other one I knew of was in 1924 over in the
Kimberley - 2 policemen got the sack over that. You
can bet your life the official number wasn’t the right
number. I was over at the Cooper when that
happened, working on a cattle station there. I worked
on Coniston for about 2 years straight after.
A blackfella showed me all the bones from the
massacre. Some were scattered; some were in a
heap. I only saw about a dozen skeletons. Any gins
and kids we saw were terrified.

Bob Buck questions the Natives

I always had a lot of respect for Aborigines. No, I
never hated the blackfella. I always reckoned it was
their country. We were intruders. Aborigines were
conned out of their own country; shot if they
wouldn’t go peacefully. All the white man had to do
was make a mark to mark his area out on a map
and it was his lawfully. They paid a nominal
amount, like a pound a square mile. I mean to say,
they’ve lived here 40,000 years or longer. All this
business about Aborigines... They had a terrible deal.
The half-castes, if they stopped in the camps, were
often not recognised; and the Aborigines were not
given a fair go. In a court case the blackfella was
always wrong.

The Afghans were very prominent around
Birdsville, Maree, Oodnadatta, Alice Springs and
Broken Hill. Big camp at Broken Hill. Gool
Mahomet Sadadeen. They were good people, the
Afghans. I got on well with them. If you came to
their camp, meal time, they always asked you to eat
with them. They were very clean fellas, the Afghans.
They eat with their left hand and wipe their behind
with their right hand. I learned a lot about handling
camels from them. They used to load pianos atop
camels; railway sleepers, galvanised iron, any
bloody thing! They used to make good money, carting
stores. I found them honest. They were treated like
Aborigines themselves. In Maree an old policeman,
Tim Lelly, used to ride his horse around town and
chase all the blackfellas back to their camp and he
used to chase the Afghans too.

I get on well with Chinamen too. They’re
friendly people, honest people. If you fell out with
a Chinaman, you fell out with the lot of ‘em. They
stick together. On cattle stations, if you had a
Chinese cook and a Chinese gardener, you lived
well. The old Chinaman, he’s got a lot of dry
humour. You couldn’t get a more hardworking people.

Aw, there’s still a few old fellas like me kickin’
about but there’s not enough history written about
Australia. The Aborigines, they got a terrible bloody
spin. They shot ‘em out, chased ‘em out. As
stockmen, you couldn’t beat ‘em. They’d have never
run their stations without them. Good horsemen;
knew every horse in the place and they knew every
corner of the property and in the struggling years,
worked virtually for nothing - bit of tucker and
tobacco. That’s all. In the Peterman and Musgrave
Ranges I’ve seen the Aborigines all in their tribal
state. They all were until well after the second world
war when they rounded them all up out of the way of
the rocket testing. From Maralinga right through to
Broome. All those desert people, they had very little
contact with white people before the rockets started.
The Aborigines I mixed with in the Peterman and
Musgrave Ranges didn’t speak any English. They
were naked or wore cockrags. Some of them might
have met white people before me but there was no
way of knowing. They only spoke their own
language. See, the blackfella had a set of laws and
the white fella came along and didn’t understand ‘em
and came along and broke ‘em.

I was a government dogger for a while in Halls
Creek. I knew an old bloke called Tom Brady, used
to put a bit of strychnine on the end of his penknife
and wash it down with a drink of tea. He was a first
war vet. and had some war complaint. Used to shake
like a leaf, but the strychnine stopped it. I know when
I was changing strychnine from one bottle to another
and a bit of wind blew a tiny bit towards me face, I’d
get a terrible headache straight away. Monty Sullivan
and a couple of his mates at Katherine, the cork came
out of the strychnine or the bottle broke in their
packbag and it all got mixed up with their flour and a
couple of ‘em died. It doesn’t take much to kill a
man with strychnine. They killed a lot of blackfellas
with it. Poured it in their flour or sugar or tea. Done
to clear cattle country of blacks. For every white man
killed, there might be 100 blacks killed. They put the
smallpox among ‘em too.

Dr Madigan’s crossing of the Simpson Desert with
camels was in the 1930s, but it was definitely not the
first crossing with camels; it was just the one with
the publicity. A lot of cattlemen worked around the
fringes of it. That was all hooey about Madigan and
Colston. I was in that country about that time,
knocking around that range country with camels. I
had been around the edge of it with camels but not
across it. Stockmen had been across that country
before, chasing cattle and pinchin’ cattle and getting
away with it. They shot blackfellas out near Tanami,
over 300 they reckon. It was about 1928. Compared
to other people, the ol’ blackfella was really a
harmless bastard.

One of these days Halls Creek is gonna boom
again. It was never worked out. Quite a few shows
but Halls Creek’s a big field, 100 miles long, easy,
and the Chinese never got in there. There’ll be a big
find there one day but I’ll be stonkered to push me
wheelbarrow.

Aw, a lot of history’s been lost and a lot of
bullshit’s been written but what you’re doing’s all
right. There should be more of it, Mick. There’s a
terrible lot of history lost, especially among the
blacks ‘cause they don’t write it down. My brother
Frank had a saying, “Those who the gods love die
young“; there’s a lot in that. Tom Cole is right - old
age is a bastard ... ya just hang on. Some people cut
out at 40. When I was about 91 I just got crook,
went from 10 stone 5 to 7 stone and I’m still about 7
stone. I think the human race will be like the
dinosaurs, some bloody catastrophe will come
along and blow it all up.

Fred Costello was recorded in the Red Cross Hostel in
Katherine. His history speaks for itself. It’s safe to say
he’s the last white man you could meet who’s been
speared by wild Aborigines.

Mick Joffe

’00

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Since the early 1970s, Mick Joffe's passion has been to caricature and record endangered characters of Australia, and the world.
As of 2015, the majority of these interviews exist only in manuscript form.